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Press Release

Psionic Receives NASA Award to Significantly Reduce Size, Weight, and Power of Psionic Navigation Doppler Lidar [NASA, Psionic]

May 20, 2021

Opens up more functional options covering a wider range of vehicles and trajectories

HAMPTON, VA, May 20, 2021—Psionic announced today that they have received a NASA 2020 SBIR Program Phase II award to create a chip-scale waveform modulation system for Psionic Navigation Doppler Lidar (PNDL). Once implemented, this will significantly reduce the size, weight, and power of PNDL.

“This is a major technical advancement that will further improve navigation accuracy and will make PNDL even more robust in adverse environments,” explained Steve Sandford, founder and CTO of Psionic, “All in a package with much lower mass and power.”

PNDL provides unprecedented ground-relative range and velocity-vector accuracies, precise vehicle coordinates and ground speed and other measurements necessary for safe, pinpoint landings. Built on more than a decade of work by NASA, the PNDL available today has significant improvements in size, weight, and power over earlier generations.

“When this next phase of development is complete, PNDL will be even smaller and lighter, offering more functional options in order to cover a wider range of vehicles and trajectories,” said Cliff Cummings, VP Space for Psionic. “The small size and lower cost also open up possibilities for many applications in rendezvous and docking and planetary exploration, including with rovers and small lunar hoppers.”

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NASA
Space
Space—Landing and Relanding

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